About this Book

On 5 October Warsaw surrendered, bringing hostilities to a close. But by
mid-October, Poland had already become a non-subject in Germany and an
undercover reporter for the German Social Democrats could find "hardly a
single person who still spoke of the victory'." Some hoped that now
that the dispute over Poland had been settled with the country's
dismemberment, peaceful relations with the Western powers could be
restored. And Hitler played to such sentiments when he addressed the
German Reichstag on 6 October. Insisting once again that he had no
territorial claims against Britain and France, the Führer suggested
that, with Poland's demise, the casus belli had also disappeared. This
was a line the German public was more likely to appreciate than the
French or British. When Daladier and Chamberlain rejected Hitler's olive
branch, many German citizens joined Liese and her father in concluding
that it was primarily British intransigence that was preventing a
settlement. By mid-October, children were singing ditties about
Chamberlain in the street and mimicking his famous habit of carrying an
umbrella.

However much the regime might insist that the British and French
declaration of war on 3 September, rather than Germany's attack on
Poland, had started a conflict which the German government was only too
anxious to end, nothing could conceal the fact that the war was not yet
popular at home. Even some of his military commanders had openly warned
Hitler that Germany could not expect to defeat France and Britain.
Hitler's foreign policy triumphs had done much to realign public opinion
during the three years before the war, but they had not removed the fear
of war itself. When German troops had marched across the Rhine in 1936,
working-class districts, renowned for their earlier anti-Nazi
sentiments, had hung out swastika flags for the first time. Few objected
to rolling back the conditions the Allies had imposed on Germany and
Austria after their defeat in 1918. Hitler's success in reversing
Bismarck's "Little German" unification of 1871 by drawing Austria back
into a "Greater German Reich" was an achievement German and Austrian
Social Democrats could also endorse. After all, they had themselves
attempted it at the end of the First World War, only to be thwarted by
the Allies. Whether they believed in the pan-German creed of bringing
all Germans "home" into the Reich, or in restoring Prussia's and
Austria's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century territories at the expense
of the East European successor states, or simply subscribed to Nazi
demands for colonial "living space," by 1938 and 1939 few Germans
objected in principle to Hitler's demands against Czechoslovakia or
Poland. Success had nurtured both ambition and a growing complacency
among the population at large.

But the Czech crisis had lasted long enoughfrom May to October 1938to
reveal just how much the German people feared a new conflict on the
scale of the First World War. At the height of the crisis, the regime
staged a grand military parade in Berlin on 27 September 1938 to impress
the world with Germany's might, but there were no crowds, with
passers-by literally ducking into doorways to avoid the spectacle. When
the Munich Agreement was signed three days later, Hitler might storm in
private that he had been "cheated" of his war, but almost everyone else
was deeply relieved. Goebbels had to give explicit instructions to the
German press to remind the population of the "world historic"
achievement of Munich, to counter the universal rejoicing that war had
been averted.

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